


Duty

by thedevilchicken



Category: Original Work
Genre: Age Difference, Drunk Sex, Dysfunctional Family, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Explicit Sexual Content, First Time, M/M, Masturbation, Painting, Religious Conflict, Religious Guilt, Secret Relationship, Shame, Suicidal Thoughts, Swordfighting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-13
Updated: 2018-10-13
Packaged: 2019-08-01 16:42:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16288169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: Pierre-Alexandre de Laurenac is the second son of a count. He is a deeply religious man with a head for figures and a deft touch with a paintbrush, and a member of the Cardinal’s Guard. He is also possibly the worst swordsman in all of Paris.Jean-Yves Janvier is a son-of-nobody musketeer nine years his senior, on furlough due to injury. He might just be the best swordsman in all of France.They shouldn't meet, but they meet. They shouldn't enjoy each other's company, but they do. The only issue is the way de Laurenac begins to feel runs contrary to everything he knows of his religion, and his father's wishes for the man he should be.





	Duty

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aurilly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurilly/gifts).



The September day they met was dull and grey and overcast, and not at all auspicious. 

They had gathered there for an ill-advised and somewhat petty duel. It was to be fought just after dawn and they had spent the first half hour of it with lanterns in their hands against the dwindling dark, preparing: they trampled down the overgrown field so that their friends could satisfy their honour without the threat of cuts from knee-high grass as well as newly-whetted blades. 

De Laurenac knew he had not been even second choice for second; he was standing up with Lemarchand that day due to the simple fact that no other of their company would do so, and he had regrettably allowed himself to be coerced. Janvier, on the other hand, was every first's first choice despite his recent injury and subsequent furlough for his recuperation. Tall and strong and hearty as he was, a clear head taller than any de Laurenac man would ever be, he could have fought ten duels in one single morning and then made space in his afternoon for more. He was the king's musketeers' most lauded fighter. De Laurenac was very like the least so of the cardinal's guards.

"You're new to this pursuit of ours," Janvier said to him, as the two of them stamped their way absurdly about the rather wild chosen field. Their primaries stood apart, with Duclerc's young fiancée and her elder brother there in escort, the two groups studiously separate though beneath the same small copse of trees.

"I am," de Laurenac confirmed, though he supposed the statement had not specifically required an answer. The tall grass brushed off its dew against his supple leather boots and though he told himself that didn't matter, he had half a mind to draw his sword to use it as a scythe instead. He didn't, but it was quite a narrow thing. He had the sense that Janvier would have been amused. 

"Is it always like this?" he asked, designing the field about them in an arc of his lantern.

"Usually, now it's not exactly legal," Janvier replied. He pushed down another tuft of grass with an energetic side-swipe of his boot; his injury, a musket-ball taken to the thigh, was evidently healing well. "Before, there was this cobblestone courtyard we all liked to pick, at the back of a fancy baker's shop. The whole place smelled like fresh bread most days and I'd buy a cake or two on my way home." 

"So you do this often?" de Laurenac asked.

Janvier shrugged. "More often then than I do now," he said.

"You sound almost like you miss it." 

Janvier paused. He turned his head though nothing else besides and looked at him, hard, in the flicker of the lantern still swinging from his hand. His expression made de Laurenac pause, too, with a clenching in his gut. 

"I don't," Janvier said, then he shook his head, and the smile he forced onto his face - perhaps in an attempt toward some kind of levity - was more akin to wincing. He turned away. They returned to their work, and then they turned to the duel. 

Duclerc's fiancée demanded Lemarchand's life in recompense for a recent insult; he'd made drunken reference to the proportions of her nose, which all concerned had to admit were on the larger side of things. Duclerc, for his part, was willing to consider the matter closed at the first sign of blood - a scratch to Lemarchand's face at the hinge of the jaw - and they retired from the field while the lady grumbled. 

Lemarchand had a reputation for inebriated insults and creative and amusing as de Laurenac knew they could be, he had no wish to die that day in defence of them. Janvier, by all accounts, had just as little invested in the affair as he had himself. As they mounted their horses and steered for the road, he glanced over his shoulder; Janvier made a short quarter-bow in his direction, across the field they had trampled together, and de Laurenac touched the wide brim of his hat in reply. 

Had the duel gone to seconds, he had no doubt that Janvier would have killed him where he stood, injury or no. The intriguing thought was that if he had, Janvier might have felt regret for it. 

\---

The scene when they met again a fortnight later was another utterly unnecessary duel. It had been just as hastily construed as the first, though with far less grass for the seconds to contend with before events could then commence. What little there was stood up between the worn old pavés that led away up the hill from the square in which Duclerc and Lemarchand had agreed to meet. De Laurenac and Janvier stood together in the mist of early morning rain and watched the two of them cross swords while their bootheels slipped on the rain-slicked, sloping pavestones. 

"I could have chosen a more suitable venue if I'd stuck a hatpin in a map," de Laurenac muttered to himself, or two the two of them at most, as they watched from underneath the low, surrounding portico. It provided very little cover, given how the fine spray blew in from the side. 

"But you have to admit _suitable_ would have been much less entertaining," Janvier replied. He was leaning against the nearby wall, casually crunching through an apple with one glove pulled off and tucked into his belt so he could lick the errant juice up from his fingers. De Laurenac wished he wouldn't. "I tell you what: if these two fools ever have a serious duel, we'll be sure to make them choose a serious location." 

Janvier's eyes were still on him as he tilted his head to lick the apple juice from his wrist, his tongue to the skin just by his cuff. De Laurenac's chest felt a fraction tight. Uneasily, he forced himself to look away. He pressed one hand to the cross that lay beneath his shirt, against his chest.

"What makes you think they're not serious now?" he asked, though he had to admit they didn't precisely look the part. The two of them had been sliding around the square on their smooth-soled boots for ten minutes or more by that point in proceedings, snatching at each other's cuffs and collars in an attempt to remain upright. And, this time that Duclerc's fiancée and her stern-faced brother were not in attendance, the urgency had apparently trickled out of their armed engagement. 

Janvier raised his brows at him as he tossed his apple core to the ground. Duclerc's horse ate it in one bite. 

"You don't know your man at all, do you," he said, though the statement seemed entirely lacking in either judgement or indeed malice. 

"No, I don't suppose I do," de Laurenac replied. 

"Then why are you here?"

"Because he asked me to be." 

"And it doesn't matter to you that all of this is founded on some nonsense of a feud between the two least honourable men we know?"

"Why would it?"

Janvier smiled at him what de Laurenac might have characterised as fondly. 

"You really are as good a man as they say you are," he said. "I have to admit, I didn't think that was possible." 

De Laurenac was poised to protest his purported goodness when Duclerc shouted out and interrupted. It seemed to be as much in frustration as in pain and Lemarchand gave a highly undignified whoop to celebrate his victory. Janvier clapped him on the back as he pushed away from the wall and made toward his rather less than seriously wounded brother-in-arms. 

"Wait!" de Laurenac called after him, and Janvier turned with an unbalanced sideways skid of his own as de Laurenac threw him a small, cloth-wrapped parcel tied with a length of string. He pulled at the string and opened it up and gave a grin that seemed to light him up in spite of the worsening rain. 

"I told you you were a good man!" Janvier called back, with a sweeping, precariously slipping quarter of a bow in his direction. Then he took a bite from the cake he was holding and he turned and walked away toward Duclerc. De Laurenac, just for a moment, watched him as he went. He didn't feel like a good man. Watching him, he felt like a selfish one.

He wasn't entirely sure why he'd taken the detour by the bakery on the way to the duel in the square. He wasn't sure why he'd taken the time to find out from the older guards where that bakery was, or to describe Janvier in all his glory to the bemused clerk there at the counter. He'd found out what it was he'd liked in the time before the king's musketeers and the cardinal's guards had ceased to frequent the area, and he'd bought two - one for Janvier, and one for himself. 

He wasn't sure why he'd done it. He did, however, leave the square at Lemarchand's side with a warm, diffuse sense of satisfaction in his chest and in his limbs all the way down to his fingertips. He left with the memory of Janvier's wide smile stowed away safely in his head. 

\---

A fortnight later, when he next saw Janvier, it was for yet another duel to be fought upon the scantiest of pretexts. 

They sat together companionably on a nearby wall, just tall enough that Janvier's feet didn't reach the ground any more than did de Laurenac's, and they ate late season apples while their primaries fought around the hard-packed earth of the expansive, empty marketplace. Lemarchand had evidently said something else he shouldn't have and Duclerc had issued still another challenge, which had been hastily accepted. The need for seconds was just as minimal as ever, yet there they were in the dying light at dusk.

Lemarchand won, as he usually did. Duclerc was so very lightly wounded as it made no matter, as was usually the case. And when they hopped down from their perch atop the wall to leave, a trickle of juice spilled down over de Laurenac's bare palm; Janvier caught his wrist and licked it away with one quick, wet swipe of his tongue, then he smiled a roguish smile and laughed as he turned to skip away. 

De Laurenac stared after him. For a moment, he wished they hadn't met. In the next, he wished they weren't supposed to hate each other. 

When he next saw Janvier, it was for another duel. Nine days had passed since the last and in that time he had tried his level best to excise the aching thought of friendship with him, to absolutely no avail. He found it so refreshing to speak with a man who would speak his mind and damn the consequences, and who was in the end so very different from himself. He had thought about him daily, he supposed, while about the cardinal's business with the other guards, or sat closeted in the company's office. They tolerated his presence for reason of his loyalty and cleverness with figures and with planning, and not least of all his good name that meant his father's money. Janvier, on the other hand, almost seemed to like him as a man and not a coin purse. But, then again, very close to everyone spoke well of the great swordsman Janvier. 

They sat together in the thin afternoon light on a low old tree stump, so close together that every now and then their knees strayed wide and bumped against each other. It was a pasture full of cows that time, who seemed less perturbed by the duellers' presence than the duellers were by theirs, as they danced their way around them. With their backs turned to the city and away from the road that led back into it, de Laurenac could almost pretend that he was home again, so many miles away. Sometimes he missed it, but mostly he did not. 

Duclerc was finally victorious, for once, thanks to Lemarchand's unfortunate introduction to a particularly hardy tuft of grass that knocked him off his balance. When the two of them mounted their horses and made to leave, de Laurenac supposed he and Janvier were meant to ride with them in a kind of post-duelling escort, but Janvier waved them on and they remained there a while longer, till the chill in the early November air made them start to shiver. De Laurenac removed his cloak, slung fashionably about one shoulder, and wrapped it tight around himself. Janvier fetched a rather ugly scarf from a pouch at his saddle and looped it ridiculously around his neck. They sat closer together, for the warmth that it provided. De Laurenac told himself the situation was, for him at least, perfectly comfortable. 

"You know," Janvier said. "One day I'd like to meet you somewhere that has less duelling." 

"Did you have somewhere in mind?" de Laurenac replied, finding himself rather oddly intrigued. 

"I'll give it some thought." 

"Might I suggest not a cow field?"

Janvier grinned. "I'll take that under advisement," he said. "Maybe a ball next time. I bet you dance. All you country gents do." 

"Better than I fight, at least." He gave him a faintly rueful sideways glance. "We should go, I think." 

"Before we're missed?"

"Before someone reports us seen together." 

Janvier nodded. He stood, hauling himself upright with a groan, then he held out one gloved hand that de Laurenac took to let him help in to his feet. He was quite an average height himself but being so close to Janvier made him feel very small indeed, and for a moment Janvier held onto his hand, looking at him in a way that made his insides feel unsettled. Then he took off his ridiculous scarf and wound it about de Laurenac's neck. It was still warm from the heat of his skin. 

"You look colder than I am," he said, by way of explanation, though it seemed very like he couldn't believe that thought himself, let alone convince de Laurenac that he should. Then he stepped back. He inclined his head almost like a bow. "The way those two are going, I'll likely see you soon," he said, then he turned and strode for his horse. 

De Laurenac might have wished they'd never met, but he also wished he hadn't left. He couldn't for the life of him understand why, at least not then.

\---

When they met again another eight days later, it was in a tavern during a brawl. Later, rumours would abound of how the fight had started, but the truth lacked much of the wit the rumours gave it: a musketeer had stumbled and spilled a guard's wine, then refused to make an apology. A punch was thrown. A knife was drawn. The more sensible of the patrons fled. The guards and the musketeers were not among the sensible.

De Laurenac was sadly no more able with his fists than with his sword, though he had trained since youth, but nonetheless he became reluctantly embroiled in the affair. A tankard to the face sent him skittering across the flagstones straight into a man's broad back; when that man turned, already poised to strike, he grimaced as he braced himself but found the blow that he expected did not actually come. The man, of all the men it could have been, was Janvier. 

"I don't think you belong here," Janvier told him, jovially, with his voice raised above the din of fighting. 

De Laurenac's eye was by then already swelling. A split in his bottom lip trickled blood down his chin and his neck into his shirt. 

"Frankly, I don't think so, either," he replied. He suspected Janvier, on the other hand, was in his element; he proved this when he smiled at him and threw an elbow back that struck against a nearby guardsman's throat. Then he gestured to the door. 

"Shall we?" he asked. 

"By all means," de Laurenac replied, though he was struck by the absurdity of the suggestion. 

They left together. He hoped they were not seen, though could have not quite cared about it if they were.

There were other taverns in the city that were not so full with the brawling men of antagonistic factions, and Janvier led the way to one. Its suspicious though accommodating proprietress provided a clean cloth and a bowl of hot water and didn't raise more than a murmur of complaint when Janvier dabbed at de Laurenac's swollen, bloodied eye as they sat there at the table. 

When de Laurenac winced and flinched away, Janvier slipped one hand into his long, dark hair, at the back of his neck, to hold him still. When he was done, he pressed the cloth against de Laurenac's split lip and ran it down his chin, his throat, to the collar of his doublet that he unbuttoned to his sternum, exposing skin, to wipe the blood away from the skin and the cross that lay beneath. Then, the cloth set aside on the stained old tabletop, he touched his calloused thumb just lightly to the split. 

De Laurenac's traitorous heart beat faster at the sting of it. He parted his lips to take an unsteady breath and when the tip of his tongue met Janvier's thumb, it was an accident, it truly was. It was an accident, but de Laurenac's cheeks flushed from it nonetheless. It was an accident, until Janvier's thumb dipped in deliberately past his teeth, and de Laurenac hesitated just one brief moment before he licked at the pad of it with the tip of his tongue. His skin tasted of leather and wine and de Laurenac's own recently spilled blood and one more brief moment later, he pulled back from him, aghast. 

"I didn't mean--" he began to say, but Janvier just gave a shrug of his broad shoulders as he wiped his thumb off on the cloth. 

"I don't suppose you did," Janvier replied, with a hint of a rueful smile. He patted de Laurenac's good cheek almost fondly with one of his big hands, threw back what was left inside his cup of wine in one long gulp, then stood up from the table. "I'm Janvier, by the way," he said, and gave him that same quarter of a bow he had before, a number of times. "I don't think we were ever introduced, which makes sense for those two prick friends of ours. Jean-Yves Janvier." 

"De Laurenac," de Laurenac replied. "Pierre-Alexandre de Ferrigny de Laurenac." And Janvier smiled down at him. 

"I know who you are," he said, like he meant more than his name. Then he gathered up his hat and his gloves and he gave one last quick nod, then he was away. He swept up the stairs to a room above and closed the door behind him, while de Laurenac looked on through his good eye. 

He found he wished that Janvier hadn't left, but found he couldn't follow. He went home instead, or at the least he retired to his own rooms. Home was a long way away, and singularly uninviting. 

The old sword that lay on top of his armoire seemed to mock him as he sat down at the desk. His father would have disapproved wholeheartedly. 

\---

Pierre de Laurenac was born the middle son of three in a market town that sat straddling the Charente river. It had a grand stone bridge connecting one side to the other that his grandfather - Alexandre, second comte de Laurenac - had commissioned nearly eighty years before then helped to build. He had been, by all accounts, a man of truly excellent character: he was kind and worldly and passionate and pious, the latter most of all. He was a man of faith, and so his sons and theirs were also raised to be so. 

Pierre's elder brother by eight years, next in line to become comte and who had managed the family's estate for several years by then, was named Jean-Alexandre de Ferrigny de Laurenac. His younger brother by three years, who had gone into the priesthood per their father's wishes, was named Louis-Alexandre de Ferrigny de Laurenac. All their lives, they had lived in their grandfather's shadow. All their lives, they had known what they would do, and be. They knew their duty; all that remained was to carry it out.

Sitting in his lodgings later on that evening, his face still throbbing, Pierre de Laurenac felt unsure of that duty for the first time in nine years. He felt unsure for the first time since he'd left his childhood home for the king's army and, from there, for Paris. He sat down by the window by the flickering of candlelight in the coming winter chill, and he questioned himself as he went through one of his colleague's accounts. He had spent six years with the king’s armies fighting overseas, though once his skills had had their testing, his grandfather’s sword at his side had become almost purely ornamental. His company commander had praised his bravery, his precision and his steadfastness, but not his talents with sword or musket; word had come to Captain Beaufort of the guard about the precise direction in which talents lay and with all haste he had sacked their accountant; now de Laurenac spent his days balancing accounts, for the company and for his fellow officers. 

He turned to the books and he questioned himself. He almost felt he had the taste of Janvier's skin still in his mouth and the touch of his fingers on his skin. He almost wished for more, but knew that could not - and _should_ not - be. Perhaps he was not what every guardsman ever hoped to be, but he was still a guardsman. Perhaps he was not what ever son might hope to be, but he was still his father's son.

And yet, in the small hours, as his candle guttered and he at last retired to bed, his mind returned to Jean-Yves Janvier. He was tall and broad and bluff and affable, skin tanned from the sun and hands calloused by swordplay. He was well-liked and well-respected despite his relatively lowly birth, and had played his part in duels that were more in number than de Laurenac had lived his years on earth. He had an easy smile and a genial nature and he fought to earn his keep where de Laurenac's good name and his facility with numbers served a similar purpose. Perhaps, he thought, they had both tired of that life, though he supposed that Janvier had had more years at it to tire him. 

He thought of Jean-Yves Janvier as he closed his eyes to sleep. He thought of Janvier's coarse fingers tangled in his hair. He thought of Janvier's thumb against his stinging lip. He thought of his ill-shorn face and his light, smiling eyes and his greying hair cropped so close to his scalp as to be thought very highly unfashionable to say the least. De Laurenac's own fell in brown-black waves down to the collar of his impeccable shirt. His boots were always polished where Janvier's were worn and dull. He was smaller and slighter and vastly less able, but there was still one thing he could do, if nothing else.

The morning that followed, he returned to a pursuit that he had never truly put away, though truly duty said he should: he fetched charcoal and paper and sat down at his desk, and he sketched out the lines of Janvier's by then so familiar face. The image, however, was not true. He couldn't capture him, try as he might. His old master, who had been dismissed not long after his mother died so he could concentrate on the more practical pursuit of fencing, would have quite despaired of him, but he knew advice would have followed shortly. He knew what that advice would have been.

Art, as he saw it, followed anatomy. He took to watching Janvier each time the paths of their two cadres crossed after that, and they seemed to cross with some regularity in the days and weeks that followed: duels came and went, and fights, and tense moments as their companies passed by each other in the Paris streets. He watched his gait and his expressions and the languid way he stretched his arms and back, as if covering some old injury or other and not just his most recent one. He watched him eating, drinking, fighting, singing, a smile on his face though he was weary in his eyes, and the casual weight of his palm against the hilt of his sword at his waist that sat there, ever ready. But weeks passed and still the drawing would not come. He still could not capture him. He thought, perhaps, closer study would improve his eye, and then he could be rid of all those thoughts of him.

"May I join you?" he asked, as he came over to his table in the tavern above which he seemed to live, one late November day when the sun was hanging low. Janvier looked at him over his wine and meat and bread and cheese, and frowned. De Laurenac understood his reaction; approaching him directly, when they had no pretext for the meeting, was not something he had done before. It was a risk, but he had decided to take it.

"Please do," Janvier replied, and he kicked out a chair for him to sit down on. "What can I do for you? Some wine?"

De Laurenac nodded. "Please," he said, and Janvier waved his landlady over with a second cup and a full new flagon, then he returned to his meal.

"So, I hear you're an artist as well as an accountant," Janvier said, gesturing at him with a piece of cheese. It broke the silence, at least, when de Laurenac just sat there with his wine in hand and said absolutely nothing, against all of his plans. 

"I'm a soldier," de Laurenac replied, stiffly, though he could feel his face turn a fraction hot. 

"But you paint? Duclerc tells me you paint the exact likeness of all the guards' mistresses after just a glance or two." 

"Sometimes that's all they get themselves, in daylight," de Laurenac said. "I'm sure my talents have been exaggerated." 

"Duclerc does have a flair for the dramatic," Janvier admitted. "But I'd like to see for myself." 

De Laurenac felt his insides twisting sickly. "There's a mistress whose likeness you'd like me to paint?" he asked.

"I want you to paint me." 

"For your mistress?"

Janvier gave him an odd look for a moment, which de Laurenac found he could not read, then glanced down at his plate as he tore a chunk of bread in two. "Yes," he said. "For my mistress."

"And you mean to pay me for the work?"

"Do the guards pay you?"

"No. But I'm afraid you're not a guard."

Janvier chuckled, and he waved one hand vaguely to concede the point.

"How about I pay in trade?" he said. "Fencing lessons for a portrait." 

"Are you saying my swordplay needs assistance?"

Janvier smiled at him, maybe a little teasing at the edges. He shifted forward with his elbows on the table either side of his plate, leaning closer. 

"I think we both know it does," he said, and de Laurenac couldn't find it in himself to be offended by the truth of the matter when he heard it.

Frankly, he knew he should say no; of course, however, he did not. What he said, with a strange sort of thrill that he sought dearly to deny, was, "When shall we begin?"

\---

The notion of a portrait seemed to present the perfect solution to de Laurenac's problem. However, it was not.

On the first day, Janvier arrived with a bag slung over his shoulder; inside were all the individual components of his best uniform, and he proceeded to strip off his doublet and shirt and breeches until every inch of his skin was bare, only to dress himself again in the attire in which he wished himself to be painted. De Laurenac truly did attempt to avert his eyes, but the scars of Janvier's skin beneath his clothes caught his attention, and not just the livid red-pink-purple pucker at his healing thigh. From the look of some, it was perhaps surprising that he was still living. So, he looked. He could only hope that Janvier had not caught him doing so. 

Once he was dressed, Janvier stood himself where de Laurenac instructed: on a cross he'd chalked onto the floorboards of his studio where he knew the light was best at that hour. He had paid a few models to sit for him, just a few hours here or there; the paintings he'd produced he'd sent on to them to do with as they pleased, be that keep them or sell them or burn them in their fireplace. The subjects of the friendly commissions he'd taken from his fellow guards had never sat for him, except for Captain Beaufort's wife and daughters. That had turned out well, he'd thought, on seeing it hanging on their salon wall one night at cards. 

De Laurenac had chosen his rooms for the light they gave through the windows, which were much larger than the average. The space he had included two rooms: one in which he slept and in which he kept the bulk of his rather sparse personal belongings, and one into which the main door opened from the hallway and in which he painted. The studio was by far the larger of the two and spattered with paint where he kept his easel, with lamps and candles to help sustain the light into the night and a long bench upon which he mixed his own paints, from pigments bought in town or found in places he had been over the years. 

Janvier stood tall in the centre of the room, in his hat and his blue tabard with its cross and fleur-de-lis emblazoned on the chest, one hand at the hilt of his sword and the other resting on a cane he very obviously did not require for walking. He cut quite the dashing figure standing there, polished and upright and the image itself of what a musketeer should be. He had even taken the time to shave his usual unkempt facial hair, which ranged in length from unruly stubble to something seeming almost but not quite intentional, into a much more fashionable moustache and beard arranged about his mouth and chin. He rubbed at it with one gloved hand every now and then as de Laurenac made his preliminary sketches, like he found the novelty distracting, or perhaps it was itself meant as a distraction from the studious silence they inexplicably kept. 

"You know, I can draw while you talk," de Laurenac told him. "When I need to concentrate on your face, I'll ask you to stop." 

Janvier grinned and breathed an exaggerated sigh of relief, and the silence remained firmly broken from then on, and for the remainder of the hour. Janvier changed again afterwards, back into his more usual attire, and again de Laurenac tried hard to convince himself he shouldn't look. The issue was, however, that he still had a sheaf of paper sitting on his knee and charcoal in his hand and it was so very simple to surreptitiously set down the rudiments of him upon the page: the line of his bare back as he pulled off his shirt, his biceps, calves, the arches of his feet. His eyes were drawn. So was his curiosity, though he wished that were not so.

"Should we go outside?" Janvier asked, once he was dressed again, as he tap-tapped at the hilt of his sword rather meaningfully. 

"Now?"

"Well, there's no time like the present and I do owe you a debt," he said. 

"Then I suppose we'd best," de Laurenac replied, as Janvier smiled like he enjoyed the idea of the exercise. He suspected that smile would not last once he had witnessed his student's lamentable skills in action, however, as he stepped into the bedroom to retrieve his doublet and his usual sword. All he could think was that perhaps the experience would provide new insights, and then he could move on to forget their brief encounter. His life would return to its usual order of prayer and paints and finances.

Practice in the courtyard to the rear of de Laurenac's lodgings did, on the contrary, absolutely nothing to dampen Janvier's spirits. He laughed and he smiled and he clapped de Laurenac across the back as they ranged about the place, the air ringing with the regular contact of their swords, so he could get the measure of him. De Laurenac stumbled to the ground and Janvier helped him back up to his feet, one gloved hand warm against his. Janvier forced him back against a wall just by virtue of his clever footwork and then pushed both their swords toward his throat. The fact of it was that Janvier was, as he was sure that they had known already, by far the better swordsman. What de Laurenac had till then failed to comprehend entirely was that his superior height and bulk and strength were only part of it; Janvier also fought with exceptional skill. 

"You know, you're terrible," Janvier said when they were done, seeming oddly jovial about it though not in the least perturbed, and de Laurenac found he didn't have it in him to be angered by the pronouncement of it when it was both true and strangely jolly. 

"Are you surprised?" he asked instead. "Or are you disappointed?"

"Neither one nor the other, as it happens." Janvier stood back. He lowered his sword and he looked him over, slowly, head to toe. The strange intimacy of it made de Laurenac shiver. "I can work with this," he said, and he designed the shape of him in the air with the point of his sword. 

"You truly think so?"

"I wouldn't say it if I didn't," Janvier replied. He sheathed his sword. "I can't promise to make you prodigious in the art, but if you keep your expectations reasonable..."

"Sir, I will settle happily for barely adequate." 

Janvier took de Laurenac's shoulders in his hands and squeezed. "Then I'll be back tomorrow and we'll get to it," he said. And he winked so quickly that de Laurenac could almost have believed it had not happened before he turned to stride away again. 

As de Laurenac went back inside, through the low back door and into the limewashed staircase that led up to his rooms, it felt quite inexplicably as if a weight had lifted from him. He had not realised that Janvier's good opinion of him had meant so very much. 

\---

The following day, after a second sitting in the studio upstairs, his training began in earnest. It then continued over the days that followed. 

The truth of the matter was de Laurenac's memory was exceptional and he did not need to see Janvier posing there, day in and day out, in order to recall what it was he was to paint. But he did not tell him not to come or that they could restrict themselves to swordplay without the hour of paints that came before it. He did not tell him not to change his clothes, or indeed that he should not leave them where they were when they were done, strewn haphazardly about the studio, as had been the habit of a number of his old army colleagues, or indeed his colleagues' mistresses. Madame Michaud, his landlady, tut-tutted as she folded them up daily. Had any of the other guards found Janvier's best blue tunic there, they would have done a great deal more than tutting. 

They fought daily, after the sittings. Janvier broke down each manoeuvre into its most basic of component parts and he demonstrated patiently in the mid-November morning frost while their breath fogged in the air. It was slow work, and hard word, duplicating all of Janvier's figures in the best way that he could, his sword in hand. Though he left each lesson breathless and he did have some success, that success was limited. 

"Maybe think about it like a dance," Janvier told him on the fifth day that they met. "I'm teaching you the basic steps you'll need to know. You need to understand their placement both in space and in the rhythm. You need to feel them. Once you have those basics, you can move on to improvise." 

De Laurenac raked back his hair with one gloved hand, exasperated. "That's not how I learned to dance," he said. "I don't _feel_ the steps. I don't understand what that means." 

"Then how did you learn?"

De Laurenac sighed. "I sketched the steps on paper, like a map." 

"Then why don't we do that?" Janvier asked, with an expansive gesture of both arms just like the answer was that simple. De Laurenac could not in that moment summon up a single reason why they should not try, however, and so they did. 

Up in de Laurenac's studio, Janvier set his sword aside and they cleared as large a space as possible there in the centre of the room. Janvier moved within that space, again and again till his leg ached and he paused to rub it, and de Laurenac sketched out the way his body shifted until the sketches he made formed a plan of sorts. When he tried it for himself, brandishing a paintbrush, he knocked over a glass and he broke a plate, but the movement came much more naturally to him than it had before. Janvier, sitting and watching from de Laurenac's usual seat, gave a brief round of applause. It felt like an improvement if not quite a victory. 

Daily, the painting and fighting continued, as a chilly November gave way to a chillier December, with a threat of snow looming ever-present in the sky. Five days became ten became fifteen and not once did Janvier enquire about his progress on the portrait or indicate he in any way believed that too much time had passed. He simply entered the room each day and stripped to change his clothes, and de Laurenac stood by and watched him do it while he pretended not to. And, later in the day, each day, before he went to bed, after he said his prayers, he sketched what he saw in those moments. He drew him out from the nape of his neck and the gold ring in one ear to the curve of his backside, from his long collarbones and the muscles of his abdomen right down to the impressive length of his membrum virilis. 

Day by day by day he drew him, again and again, until he understood with a sudden, immediate horror that he now knew nearly every inch of him that it was possible to know and that knowledge had not freed him even slightly from his thoughts of him. When he took stock, he found the situation had only worsened with more sustained and regular contact. All he could think about in bed at night was the way that Janvier looked at him sometimes and smiled like he was the only man in all of France of any import. 

The only thing that he could think to do was stop before he could not stop, and so he completed his work on the painting. He arranged it to be framed and he waited in his studio for Janvier's arrival, at his usual hour. He knew precisely what that painting was: it was bland and uninspired and utterly nondescript in every particular, demonstrating nothing at all of its subject's considerable personality. This was by no means an accident of any kind, or a reflection of a lack in de Laurenac's abilities; he had done it quite on purpose, feeling guilt seep through him with each stroke of paint against the canvas, but he was convinced - and he could not sway himself from that conviction - that it was the only way things could progress. If his work disappointed Janvier, then perhaps their strange engagement would come to its conclusion. Then de Laurenac could be free of it, and him. 

"This is..." Janvier said, when he arrived at the usual time and stepped around the easel to view the finished work. He glanced at him, finding it perhaps a little difficult to reconcile that work with the man he knew and reports of his talents that he'd heard, or even with the skill of the small number of his other works lying scattered there around the room. "Well, it's certainly me." 

"Is it not satisfactory?" de Laurenac asked. He stood apart, lingering at the threshold of his bedroom as if at any moment a hasty retreat might be required, or as if he himself required the distance in order to produce on demand such disingenuity of speech. "I apologise if so. I did warn you that my talents had perhaps undergone exaggeration." 

Janvier frowned. "It's a perfectly adequate portrait," he said, as though that were the most damning indictment he could utter. "I just expected..."

De Laurenac crossed his arms over his chest. He tilted his head, his brow furrowed. "What did you expect?" he asked. 

"Something more..." Janvier threw up his hands. He laughed out loud, exasperated, then he strode across the room to where the desk sat at which de Laurenac balanced all his colleagues' books, and where he kept his sketches. His stomach lurched inside him as Janvier leaned down to rifle through them thick sheafs of them, dropping to the desktop the charcoal outlines of monuments and churches and markets and flowers, stained glass windows, religious icons, crucifixes on cathedral walls, until he came to the ones de Laurenac had hoped so very dearly might remain his own private secret. He should have gone to him across the room and snatched those drawings back but he remained there as if rooted to the paint-spattered floorboards by the bedroom door, mortified to say the least. 

Janvier held up the drawings. He waved them at him accusatorially. "I expected something more like these," he said, then he gestured to the painting with them. "You must know that is a soulless thing! Competent, perhaps, but when _this_ is how you see me..." He held up one page so de Laurenac could see the sketch upon it, his body from the bare shoulders and up, head turned, eyes closed, lips parted, every detail of the moment there. He shuffled to another, in which he stood with his bare back turned and one bare leg raised to step into his breeches, with the barest hint of his long member shadowed there between his thighs. Then another still, where he stood naked in the early morning light that streamed in through the studio's large windows, a cup of some hot drink or other steaming in his hands and a smile on his face just like he didn't care who saw him. 

"I prefer these," Janvier said. 

"Then perhaps you should take them to your mistress, too," de Laurenac replied, and Janvier's mouth twisted bitterly as he looked at him. 

"There is no mistress," he said, bluntly. 

"I don't understand." 

Janvier strode across the room, and perhaps de Laurenac should have beat his retreat then, or otherwise escaped, but he did not. Janvier still held the sketches in one hand but with the other he cupped de Laurenac's cheek, his rough thumb rubbing at his cheekbone. Then he rested his forehead down against his, just lightly, his eyes closed. 

"I know you don't understand," Janvier said, lowly, his voice little more than a rumble in his chest that de Laurenac could disconcertingly also feel in his. "But I wish you could." Then he pressed his mouth to his, slowly, carefully, as his fingertips traced the nape of his neck. De Laurenac's heart thudded hard and he stared at him as he pulled back to step away, but Janvier just smiled a rueful little smile. 

When he left, de Laurenac let him go without a word. 

When he left, he took the sketches, and he left the godforsaken painting precisely where it was. 

\---

He could not have said with any honesty or conviction that he believed he would see Janvier again, at least not outside the spheres in which he saw any other musketeer. This was a thought he had believed would please him, or if not that perhaps would soothe him, but he could not profess to feel himself soothed. He felt agitated, as if his clothes fit ill against his skin, as if the room were too hot and then too cold again by turns, and as if the painting in his studio were mocking him by its very presence. He turned it around to face the wall instead, so he would not have to look upon his own studiously mediocre work, but it did little to improve his mood. 

Soon, he went about his work, labouring under the misapprehension that figures on a balance sheet might distract him from his troubles. They did not. He met with Lemarchand and several of the others for a late afternoon tavern meal as the sun began to set outside and still that agitation pulled at him, as he sipped from a glass of rather cheap wine and his fellows became ever more rowdy about him. He had meant for the portrait to be a disappointment, but nothing else about that morning had run in the direction he had planned it. His face felt hot - though he blamed it on the heat that poured so plentifully from the tavern's open fire - when he thought of his drawings there in Janvier's hands. When he thought of his fingers on his skin and his mouth pressed against his, he felt something else entirely. He did not wish to acknowledge it, perhaps because he simply did not know how to. 

That evening, he stayed out well past dark with Lemarchand and Chancenay and Desmoulins, drinking more than he knew was advisable as a means by which he might forget his cares. He laughed with them and joked with them though he did not feel those things, with those men who were ostensibly his colleagues and his equals: Desmoulins whose uncle was a bishop in the south, Chancenay whose elder brother was a priest among their patron's aides, and Lemarchand whose family had served the church for centuries by then. They were all sons of loyal houses, their stories all quite similar. De Laurenac knew he should have taken comfort from that fact, but the fact was he did not. After all, he had never wished himself to be a soldier, or to be among their company. 

He was drunk when Lemarchand helped him stumble home in the small hours of the morning, and the room seemed to tilt and spin around him as he said goodnight then put himself to bed. He closed his eyes and took a breath and thought about the men he and his brothers might have been had his father not imposed his will upon them. He was sure sometimes that he and his dashing, daring younger brother should have had their places swapped. Louis has gone into the priesthood and their father's money had bought him a place in the Vatican, and sometimes that life appealed to him as much as a soldier's might have done to Louis. At that moment, however, he could feel no great piety within himself, though he said his prayers and went to church and took communion just as he should, and did his duty every day. He felt very little piety as he thought of Janvier's body, and of his hands, and of his lips, and he felt his cock begin to stiffen there beneath the sheets, against his will. As his hand strayed down and he stroked himself, the way he had for so long denied, he knew he was not worthy of that life his brother had, or even of his own career. He came with a sob. In that moment, he almost wished he had never left Laurenac. 

In the morning, his head throbbed and nothing seemed very much the better for his exploits. He washed and dressed and rubbed at his bleary eyes as he attempted to occupy himself with a fresh new set of Chancenay's unpaid bills. He had more than two years previous taken Chancenay's expenditures in hand and ensured that it was viable for him to keep both wife and son and mistress, on his salary and his income as the third son of a minor baron, but the notion of the payments for Chancenay's mistress's new dress did little for de Laurenac's head. Nor did the knocking at the door that came soon after he abandoned it. 

"By God, come in!" he called, when the knocking did not cease of its own accord, and he turned in his seat to see Janvier enter. To say he was surprised by his arrival would only be inaccurate in its extent; for a moment, as they regarded one another, he was dumbfounded. 

"I did not expect to see you," he said, at last, to break the growing silence. 

"Well, it came to me that I owed you one last lesson," Janvier replied. "And I don't like to be in any man's debt." 

De Laurenac looked at him across the room, from his desk by the wall, as he stood in the doorway in the window's cold, thin light. Stubble was growing in across his jaw, filling in the parts he'd shaved to leave his almost fashionable beard. He held his hat in his hands in front of him, his head almost bowed and not just to duck in past the rather low lintel of de Laurenac's door frame. He looked serious for once. That in itself was disconcerting. 

"I don't believe you owe me anything, sir," de Laurenac said, as his head throbbed and his chest clenched, and he told himself the cause of both was the previous evening's overindulgence, even though he knew that to be incorrect. 

"I believe I do," Janvier replied. "On this point I am afraid that you cannot dissuade me." 

De Laurenac rose. "Then I would wish you to consider your debt to me discharged," he said. "I have no use for your obligation." 

Janvier came closer. He tossed his hat onto a nearby table and he came closer still and de Laurenac felt a kind of panic rise in him, surging in him, producing a chill in his fingers and a heat there in his cheeks. He expected Janvier to put his hands on him, on his arms or his shoulders or the back of his neck. He expected Janvier to kiss him, to press his mouth to his again just as he had before. And perhaps he would have let him, perhaps he might have wanted him to do it just so that he _could_ let him, and then damn the consequences, but a knock came at the door. When he glanced to it, still open just as Janvier had left it, Madame Michaud produced a letter. He went over to the door and took it, and Madame Michaud, with a discreet glance, retired. 

"I have to go," de Laurenac said, once he had scanned the contents briefly. 

"To where?"

"To Laurenac. I read here that my grandmother is dead. My brother requests that I return." 

"Then I'll go with you," Janvier said. 

"To where?"

"To Laurenac." De Laurenac's eyes widened. His brows rose. "Look, you're going to tell me no, but the roads are full of brigands and I am still officially on furlough. I should go with you. Consider this fulfilment of my debt to you." 

The so thoroughly earnest look on Janvier's face made de Laurenac turn away and laugh out loud despite himself. He shook his head. He raked back his long, loose hair. The notion was absurd. The morning had been in its entirety. 

But when he gathered his things and when he left the room, he did not tell him not to follow. 

\---

The town of Laurenac lay four day's steady ride away from the walls of Paris. By the time they would arrive, de Laurenac knew his grandmother would have been taken down to the family crypt and her funeral would have already been performed. And by the time they returned to Paris, a little more than ten days following their initial departure, close to everything had changed. 

He had not returned home in nine years, since he had left to go into the army, nor had he had much wish to do so in that time. He was twenty-seven years old by then, as he and Janvier mounted their horses and headed west, once he had sought his superior's permission to absent himself, and he found that all he'd missed in the years he'd spent away was his brothers. They had corresponded, of course, as best they could between Paris and Laurenac and Rome, and on occasion their paths had crossed in person, but that had not nearly been the same as their years growing up together. 

For the first day, de Laurenac rode just far enough apart from Janvier as to make conversation difficult, and Janvier allowed that. When they found an inn on the road where they might pause for the night, he asked him, "Were you close? You and your grandmother. You've been quieter than usual." 

De Laurenac felt his mouth twist. "She hated me," he replied, quite earnestly. "Or at least she gave no indication to the contrary." 

"Should I ask why that was?"

De Laurenac shrugged his shoulders and picked up his wine to drink. "I reminded her of my mother," he said. "She was Spanish, and so she despised her even more than me." 

Janvier frowned but did not query further. They retired to their respective rooms not long after. 

For the second day, Janvier filled the miles with amiable chatter that did little to distract de Laurenac from his own thoughts. He told him things about himself that he already knew, like that he had been born in Paris just over thirty-six years earlier and had fought in the king's army before joining the musketeers. He told him other things he didn't know, like that his father had died on a battlefield when he was just a boy, and that actually, the number of the duels he'd fought had been somewhat exaggerated over the years. His rather fearsome reputation had saved his skin more than once. The times it hadn't had left their marks behind, and they both knew de Laurenac had seen the scars. 

They slept that second night in another inn then set out in the morning, drawing ever closer to the home to which de Laurenac had long felt no desire to return. Janvier talked as they followed the curve of the river in the late afternoon, as the sun sank down lower, but suddenly de Laurenac's horse reared at the sound of a rifle shot and when he fell, he fell hard against his thigh and his dominant right wrist. It transpired that the shot was that of an overzealous local farmer scaring foxes from his hens, though the lack of promised brigands did unsurprisingly little to cease the throbbing in de Laurenac's wrist, or in his pride considering that Janvier had not also found himself unseated. They rode on to an inn they found just after sunset and after a one-handed meal, they went up to their rooms. At his door, in the corridor, Janvier unbuttoned de Laurenac's doublet and offered to help him with the rest; de Laurenac quickly declined - perhaps too quickly - and he slept the night still in the rest of his clothes. The only good that he could see in his unfortunate situation was that he couldn't use his hand for any other pursuits, either, once he was alone with just one thin wall between them. 

On the morning of the fourth day, they ate and they prepared to leave. De Laurenac's wrist had seen some improvement overnight but remained quite bruised and stiff so he was unsurprised when he nicked his jaw with the blade of his razor; when Janvier volunteered to help he almost turned him down, except that he could almost see his father's disapproving face at his improper presentation. He acquiesced and sat stock still as Janvier turned his head this way and that, as he drew the sharp edge of the razor against his skin and made de Laurenac's pulse race sickly with it. He knew he should have been more cautious - after all, the man with the blade in his hand was a king's musketeer - but he trusted that he wouldn't open up his throat. Of course, that trust did not mean that he felt safe. He knew quite well that in respect of Janvier, there were other kinds of dangers. He felt them keenly, as he touched the cross that hung around his neck. 

They arrived in Laurenac at dusk or thereabouts, and wound their way through town, down pressed dirt streets and paved ones, between ramshackle homes and grand ones, and over the bridge his grandfather had built toward the Laurenac chateau. Things had changed since his departure, if not everything: new houses had sprung up where once there had been cattle grazing, more people bustled in the streets, and the already large church had been expanded once again, so it was quite like a cathedral in its grand dimensions. The last did not come as a surprise, however; the family's concerns had always lain in that direction. 

The chateau itself stood in its own grounds a short distance from the town that was associated with it. They rode toward it up the lengthy driveway lined with trees and furrows dug by carriage wheels and took a minor detour to the stables where the same ageing footman he had known in his youth greeted him warmly and took charge of their tired horses. The housekeeper at the back door smiled and told him, "Welcome home, sir," and held the door for the two of them to slip inside without the more usual grand, loudly-announced entrance. But when they stepped out of the back rooms and came to the foot of the rather sweeping staircase, there were his father and his elder brother at the salon door. They were, unfortunately, completely unavoidable. 

"Oh, it's you," his father said. "What are you doing here, Pierrot?" 

"I wrote inviting him, father," his brother said, an explanation that was swiftly and completely ignored. 

"And who is this?" his father asked, gesturing to Janvier with his walking cane. "Where do you expect he'll stay?"

"He'll share my room," de Laurenac replied. 

"I can find an inn."

De Laurenac glanced at him sharply. "You can share my room," he said, with an edge to his voice just as sharp as his glance. Janvier smiled tightly. His father huffed and then turned and walked away just as de Laurenac's younger brother exited the salon, priest's robes still in place, to join them. 

"Is he always like that?" Janvier asked, lowly, leaning over toward de Laurenac's ear, but his voice was not low enough to escape his brothers' notice. 

"I've honestly never known him not be," Louis, the youngest, replied. 

"I'll admit it's been decades since he was last otherwise," said Jean, the eldest. He gave a wry half smile and a nod in Janvier's direction. "I'm pleased to meet you, sir. Any friend of my brother's." 

Janvier returned both the nod and the smile to Jean. "Likewise," he said. "Any brother of my friend." 

"And we'll see you at dinner?" Louis asked. 

"I'd think so, yes," de Laurenac replied. 

"Till then, then. You'll find your room is as you left it." 

His brothers left to dutifully follow their father. De Laurenac turned to lead on up the stairs, his duty temporarily forgotten. 

"You know, I don't have to stay here," Janvier said, close at his heels. "I have no wish to cause any issue between your father and yourself." 

At the door to his room, de Laurenac turned. 

"The issue was there long before you were," he said, and then he led the way inside. "When I left, I foolishly believed he might be proud of me, but he was not. I realised quite some time later that from his perspective, what I had done was simply the bare minimum expected of me. There was nothing to be proud of." He winced. "There still is not." 

Janvier, for his part, as they closed the door behind them, said no more about him leaving. 

\---

Dinner that evening was a strained and awkward affair, full of stilted conversation and his father's less than subtle interjections. 

"You are your father's eldest?" he asked Janvier, loudly, interrupting Louis' rather raucous story of ministering to the brothels of Rome. 

"Youngest of seven surviving, sir," Janvier replied, politely. 

"All male?"

"All of them female, as it happens. Save myself, of course." He took a drink. "The only brother died of fever before I was even born." 

"And your father?"

"Dead, sir. With the army. Overseas." 

"And who was he?"

"An officer, though no one very high."

"You are how old?"

"I am thirty-six years old, sir." 

"Your sisters are married?"

"All of them, yes. All married. All with children of their own." 

"So you are older than my eldest son, but you are not married." 

"No, sir, I am not." 

"Then who are you, sir?" the comte asked him. "You sit at my table but I can find little here to recommend you." 

De Laurenac clattered down his cutlery. "He is a musketeer, father," he said, finding he could no longer hold his tongue for anger and embarrassment. "He is acknowledged to be the most accomplished swordsman in all Paris. He is my friend. _I_ recommend him." 

The table fell silent with de Laurenac's outburst. De Laurenac picked up his knife and fork and looked down at his plate. At length, Louis returned to his story of the Roman brothels, though the mood was then somewhat more subdued. 

After dinner, as a light snow began to fall and to settle on the lawns, they slipped from the door and walked together, quietly for once. De Laurenac showed him the lake where they had swum in the summers and the huge old oak that they had climbed till they'd fallen and then climbed up again. He showed him the arbour, overgrown and wild by then, where his mother had liked to sit and watch him paint before she'd died, and the lane that led over the hills back into town, the quick way that you couldn't take a carriage as you had to have your horse wade across a stream. That was the way he'd brought his elder brother home after his last duel, he said, when he lost his thumb and his first finger and was rendered henceforth unable to fight. It was only due to that, and to the arthritis in his father's hands, that his grandfather's sword had come to him. His father had given it reluctantly, and now it sat untouched above his armoire back in Paris. 

They returned to the house and climbed the stair together. They went into de Laurenac's old room together, which hadn't changed at all since the day he left, then they lit a lamp from the candle they carried and undressed by the low light, to go to sleep. 

"I could sleep in a chair," Janvier said. "Or on the floor by the fire. I've had worse." 

"So have I," de Laurenac replied, and though he idly pondered asking him to do so, or wishing he had bought them both separate rooms in an inn back in town, he turned back the sheets with his good hand and he blew out the light in the lamp. He was honestly too drained and pained to care if Janvier shared his bed that night, though he supposed he should have cared. He should have cared acutely. 

Dinner that night had been an awkward affair, though it barely compared to the following night. His brother Jean and his wife Marie-Louise had organised a ball rather loosely to be given in honour of their deceased grandmother, who had loved a ball, which de Laurenac discovered that day to his complete and utter lack of all enthusiasm. While preparations bustled all around them, Jean confessed a certain concern over their finances and so de Laurenac excused himself from company to perform his own investigation. The issue, it soon became clear, was nowhere approaching the levels Jean had feared and could not himself figure onto paper, though admittedly the situation was a fraction less than optimal. The family would simply have to tuck a sous away every now and then in contrast to their usual affluence. It was, unsurprisingly, all due to the expansion of their local church.

"Do you want me to take a look at yours, too?" de Laurenac asked, gesturing to the invoices and bills and associated documents that covered up Jean's desk as he found Janvier lingering in the doorway to his brother's study, leaning against the door's sturdy wooden frame. He had spent much of the morning assisting with Jean's three sons' fencing lessons in the courtyard; de Laurenac had seen him now and then through the window, his sword in hand. He only wished the boys had Jean's talents and had not inherited his own.

"Thank you, but my sister holds my purse strings," Janvier replied, with a small smile playing at his lips, and then he shifted slightly. "I hear there's a party planned this evening." 

"There is." 

"Should I be there?"

"Yes." De Laurenac rose. "Wear your uniform. We won't stay for very long, but I have an obligation." 

They did not, in fact, stay for long that evening. De Laurenac's father stared daggers at the cross and fleur-de-lis at Janvier's chest as if it were in and of itself a direct affront to God and not just the most fitting clothes he had with him to wear, and it was not long until de Laurenac had had his fill of that. He had chosen the Cardinal's Guard because he knew his father's opinions on the matter well: they were that God should come before all else, before a man's country or his family, but at that moment as they quietly left, he wished and wished he'd gone instead into the musketeers. 

They walked away to the nearest tavern, still in their best clothes, and they drank together while the other patrons stared quite openly. The staring died away rather rapidly, however, once de Laurenac had opened up his purse to buy a drink for each drinker present, and he and Janvier continued to make light work of their wine into the night. 

"You know, I did not wish to be a soldier," de Laurenac admitted, once he was quite drunk indeed. "That was my father's wish, as the priesthood was his wish for Louis." 

"And what was your wish?" Janvier asked. 

De Laurenac's mouth took on a bitter twist. "My mother wished that I would be a painter," he said. "She planned to send me to her country to study with a master, and I believe my father, smitten with her as he was, would have let her do it." He waved one hand vaguely in the air then picked up his wine again. "It was just...she died." 

Janvier drank. Janvier frowned at him in the candlelight. "But what was _your_ wish?" he asked, and de Laurenac frowned in return. 

"I don't know," he said, lowly, as if admitting something dreadful. "I wonder if I ever had one." 

When they stumbled back down the lane to the house, there were still carriages in the driveway and music and dancing in the ballroom that they saw through the tall windows. They did not rejoin the party; they slipped in through the back door and they made their way up the back stairs to de Laurenac's room. They could hear the music and the voices and the chatter echoing through the house up to the door but once inside, Janvier began to pull off his uniform, and de Laurenac had no attention to spare for anything that was not that. It was the uniform that he had posed in all those days and looking at it, de Laurenac could only feel a strange, pervading sense of guilt. Looking at it, drunkenly, it reminded him of things he'd done. It reminded him of Janvier's mouth against his own and his own hand around his cock. 

"Is it your habit to lie with men?" he asked, as he sat down lest he fall down in a chair across the room. He had not meant to be so blunt about the question. He had not, in fact, meant to ask it at all, but still ask it he had. 

Janvier, already shirtless though the shirt was still there in his hands, raised his brows at him, evidently taken by surprise. 

"Yes," he replied. "And to sit and stand with them, too."

De Laurenac frowned. He folded his hands in his lap. "You know what I'm referring to," he said, as his cheeks flushed hot and his pulse began to quicken. 

"I'd say that's the same thing I am." Janvier tossed his shirt aside, his eyes on him, and his hands on his hips wary. "We're talking about the beast with two backs, yes? We're talking about fucking." He sighed and ran both of his hands over his short-shorn hair, and de Laurenac watched the muscles in his chest and abdomen all shift and tighten in the lamplight. 

Janvier smiled wryly. "Yes, it's my habit," he admitted next. "I have sex with men. I have no wish to marry a woman I do not love and whose features I struggle with myself to find attractive so that I might carry on a family name that no one cares about, including me. My uncle has sons, and they have sons. My sisters are all married, as you heard me tell your father. And so I lie with men, because that is my preference." He took a breath and let it out again soon after, slowly, as if it might serve somehow to steady him. He rubbed his face. He looked at him. 

"What is _your_ preference, sir?" he asked, and in one swift motion he pushed down his breeches to the tops of his boots, baring himself down to the knees. He wrapped one big hand around his cock and gave a stroke. "Is _this_ your preference? Is that why you ask?"

De Laurenac clamped one hand over his mouth. He stared at him, his face hot, his cock stirring. He nodded. Drunkenly, stupidly, he nodded. 

"Yes," he said. His voice sounded raw. And this was something that Janvier had clearly not expected because his eyes widened and his hand around his cock went still. He looked at him with genuine surprise as if what he had expected, to the exclusion of all other possibility, was his denial. But he did not ask again, as if he further expected that given a chance that answer would change; he just yanked up his breeches so that he could stride without tripping across the room to where de Laurenac was sitting, and he went down on his knees in front of him. His fingers fumbled drunkly at his waist and de Laurenac lifted up his hips and in a moment, in one dizzying moment, he found himself bare to the knee just as Janvier was. 

His cock was already so very close to hard - all it took was two slow strokes of Janvier's hand to bring him up to full erection, there by the hem of his shirt. Janvier pushed it up underneath his arms, out of his way, and he looked up at him from there on his knees on the floorboards that were still spattered with dried paint just like those in his rooms in Paris. Janvier's own cock was hard, his own face flushed with clear desire. Then he leaned in, and de Laurenac watched wide-eyed as he took him in his mouth. 

He had never felt anything like it. He had been raised to be pious and pure before God and this, _this_ , was neither pious nor pure, and so he had not done it. But Janvier's fingers eased back the foreskin from the head of his cock and Janvier's tongue teased at the tip of him, making him groan, making his hips buck. His head swam with wine and light and vivid new sensation. When he came almost as soon as it had started, completely overwhelmed by it, he would have felt much more ashamed had Janvier not simply swallowed all around him, deeply, and then sat back on his booted heels. He would have felt much more ashamed had Janvier's cock not still been huge and thick and hard between his thighs. 

Janvier touched him. He put his hands on his bare thighs and pressed his mouth there, too, and nuzzled at the place where thigh met abdomen. His fingertips brushed between his legs, against his balls that pulled tight at the contact, against his oversensitive cock that seemed to twitch against his fingers, and he licked him there again until the pleasure of it was so much it almost hurt. De Laurenac's nails raked Janvier's shoulders and as he spread his knees wide, as his breath hitched, as his muscles tightened, he could feel himself begin to stiffen up again. That was when Janvier pulled back and stood and stripped himself of boots and breeches until every inch of skin was bare. That was when he went to the bed and he went down on the mattress, on his forearms and his knees, with one last flushed glance over his shoulder. 

De Laurenac understood. He undressed himself, too, fumbling from the wine and the faint sting of pain still in his wrist. He retrieved the oil he used mostly to maintain his weaponry and then he joined him on the bed. 

He understood, at least in theory. He slicked himself with oil from root to tip and wiped his hand off on the sheets. He spread Janvier's cheeks apart with both his palms. He touched one thumb to his hole and felt it pull tight beneath it. Then, hot and hazy, already breathless, he eased his cock against him. He pushed, and he slipped, and he pushed, and he slipped, until at last, at last, at glorious last, he felt the tip push into him. Janvier groaned low and rough against the mattress. De Laurenac pushed deeper. He felt him open up around him, only just enough for him to enter. He gripped his hips. His head swam. He began to move and he wished fervently that it would last but he could then already feel his release begin to claw at him. When Janvier stroked himself, when he came and pulled tight around the length of him, he came, too, in dizzying waves, pushed up deep inside him. 

For a moment, he stayed precisely where he was, his pulse racing, his breath short. He ran his hands over Janvier's hips, then he gave one small final thrust in him before he eased back out again. They stretched out side by side, naked, their skin cooling. And the enormity of what it was that he had done began to dawn. He pushed it back as best he could, just for a time.

He had not meant for it to happen. At the start of their path back in Paris, he had intended the precise opposite, yet there they were. 

He blew out the light. He would deal with the consequences in the morning. 

\---

In the morning, he did not deal with the consequences; he ignored them in the most bald-faced manner possible. He said a firm goodbye to his protesting brothers and then saddled his horse in the stable outside. He left the house, and left the estate, and left Laurenac. He rode away while Janvier was still asleep there in his bed without him. He had no idea what else to do.

On the return journey, he took a more circuitous route so that he might avoid unwelcome company along the way. He rode an extra day through the light snow and burned his borrowed scarf that still smelled like Jean-Yves Janvier in the tavern fire one night. He was colder without it, yes, but he told himself that was his preference. He did not mind the chill, after all. It encouraged calm. It encouraged contrition. 

When he returned, he could see a figure standing at his window, and so he found himself another room that night. In the morning, he waited in the shadows until he saw Janvier depart again, and then he slipped inside unnoticed. He took his clothes and his books and his grandfather's sword, paid Madame Michaud for the paint on the floors and disposal of all the things that he left - brushes and paints and easels and the like - and then he quit that place. His new room was small and dark and overlooked a chapel where he said his prayers each morning and each night, in penitence for what he'd done and what else he had wanted to. He would not go back again. It had to stop, and he knew that.

When he next saw Janvier, it was clear that he had at last returned to the musketeers from his furlough. When their gazes met across the street, Janvier seemed almost ready to dismount his horse and go to him, for answers or for retribution, but de Laurenac turned his face away, one hand pressed tight to the cross that lay beneath his shirt. He knew he must excise the desire he felt, which had caused him to shame his family so and act so disloyally toward his father, which kept him awake each night though he prayed that it would leave him be. That night, in bed, it did not leave him be. He pressed his face into the mattress and pressed his cock into his hand and he told himself it would be the last time. It had to be, he told himself, because he could not be a good man, or a good son, or a child of God as he had been raised to be, if these were the things he wanted. 

It was January before he knew it, then February came along, and still each time they saw each other felt like a twist of a knife in his gut. He did his job and he prayed each day and he promised himself he would not succumb, but he knew it was inevitable. Each time they saw each other, there were images of things he knew he must not have, and should not want. Each time they saw each other, he imagined his mouth and his hands and a quiet room, their bodies breathless, slick skin to skin. He imagined conversations lasting hours. He imagined his so easy smile, which he missed the very most of all. 

It was February, the sky bright but cruelly cold, when Lemarchand next approached him to be his second. He almost refused, knowing who would of course appear as Duclerc's second, but the fact was that he could not bear to make that refusal; he told him yes and in the morning, at dawn, he came to the field outside the city walls where they had first met those months ago. The grass had been cut so they had no need to trample it and while the two duellers fought their duel, de Laurenac kept his distance, and averted his eyes. He could almost feel the weight of Janvier's gaze on him, and the weight of the things they had done together, as Lemarchand's sword clashed against Duclerc's. His illicit knowledge of Janvier's body weighed on him, too, somehow intimate as a razor blade scraping there against his throat. And when Lemarchand drew first blood, and won as a result, he was struck with sudden, awful knowledge of exactly what it was that he must do. It made him sick. It made him giddy. They would, he thought, have to fight.

"He'll kill you," Lemarchand said, straightforwardly, when he told him what he planned to do. 

When he replied, "Perhaps," it obscured _I know_ beneath. "And you voiced no similar concerns at any point when I volunteered to be your second." 

Lemarchand sighed. "Perhaps because Duclerc and I have no intent to end each other's lives," he said. "For God's sake, he and I were best friends when we were children. This is just the only way we can legitimately meet, under the circumstances." 

It should perhaps have come as a surprise but de Laurenac could not find surprise in himself, though whether that was because it made quite a lot of sense all things considered or because he found himself somewhat preoccupied, he could not say. 

"He says no," Lemarchand reported, when he saw him the next day, working at his desk in the company's small office. 

De Laurenac did not look up. "Then ask again," he said, and returned to his work. 

"He refuses," Lemarchand reported again the following day, as they ate in a tavern at dusk. "He says there's no foundation to it. It's a frivolous challenge. Honestly, I think he's right." 

"He's wrong," de Laurenac replied, over his bread and cheese. "Go back. Do not let him tell you I am not worth his time." 

"I think you know his answer," Lemarchand reported, in the company's courtyard the following day, as the new recruits were inspected. 

De Laurenac turned to him. He seized him by his arms. 

"Tell him if he will not fight me, he utterly shames me," he said, his tone vehement, with perhaps a touch of desperation to the edges. "He will fight me, Lemarchand. Tell him he has to."

The following day, Lemarchand looked sick as he came to deliver the news. "He agrees," he said. "Tomorrow at dawn. In the square behind the house you used to live in." 

De Laurenac felt a wave of pure exhilaration. He felt light, and free, and ready for what he was sure would follow. In the morning, he dressed, and he belted his grandfather's sword at his waist because of this, he was sure, no one could be ashamed. He would be brave. They would be proud. He would not be defeated, at least not in any way that mattered. 

"Don't make me do this," Janvier said, as they stood together in the square, but even the broken tone to his voice could not change his mind at all. He cast off his doublet. He drew his sword. 

"You must," he said. "You must." And he struck first, but Janvier parried. 

It was not a lengthy duel, nor had de Laurenac expected that it would be. When the sword pierced his skin, a bright point spilling blood, he knew that was his end. 

He had expected that moment to be pure, and exalted, and closer then to God than he had come before, but he was disappointed. All he saw was the look of utter devastation there on Janvier's face at what he had been made to do. All he felt was the bitterness of his own regret. 

In the moment that he died, he knew had had been wrong. He had been so very, very wrong.

\---

"Careful," Duclerc said. "Steady. We wouldn't want you to die." 

De Laurenac opened his eyes into candlelight. He blinked. The room spun about him. He closed his eyes again. 

"Where am I?" he asked. "What is this? I don't understand." He coughed. His chest hurt. "I died. Did I not die?"

"You bled just enough to make it look good," Duclerc replied. "We left the city hours ago. Everyone thinks you're dead." 

It made no sense, but he did not have the wherewithal to ask any further questions. Just one moment more and he drifted off again. 

When he woke again, he was astride a horse. Duclerc rode behind him. He leaned back against his chest, weak, to keep from falling to the ground. 

"Where are we?" he asked. "Where is Janvier?"

"Well, everyone thinks he killed you," Duclerc replied. "He took a different road to keep the guards from finding you and taking you back." 

"But I'm not dead." 

Duclerc chuckled wryly. "No, you're not," he said. "But you might as well be. That's what he's done for you." 

De Laurenac might have been weak and tired and breathless, aching, dizzy, but he understood what Duclerc had said; dead men have no duty. But one more moment and he had not the consciousness to answer. 

"They'll hang him if they find him," he said when he woke, a rising sense of panic in him, as Duclerc sat by and passed him a shank of fresh-cooked meat. 

"Yes, they will," Duclerc replied. 

"I could stop them." 

"Yes, you could." 

"Does he want me to?"

"No. But in a day or so you can ask him for yourself." 

He slept that night rather than simply losing consciousness again. In the morning, they rode on.

"Why are you doing this for me?" he asked, as Duclerc helped him up onto his own horse, now he was strong enough to ride apart.

Duclerc smiled faintly. "Because Lemarchand said you'd do it for him," he replied. "And he'd do it for me. Ride six hours south-west. Stop by the broken windmill."

Duclerc left him then. De Laurenac rode on.

He rode through the trees, by a stream, through the unfamiliar countryside. All he knew was he was far from where he'd started back in Paris on the day he'd thought he'd died, and far from anyone who knew his name. Duclerc and Janvier had seen to that. He supposed he could have turned and headed north, or found a nearby village and asked them where he was so he might have a sign to navigate by, but the fact was his chest ached where Janvier's sword had pierced it and underneath that where his heart was curiously still beating, even then. Janvier had sacrificed for him. He had made a mistake, and he saw that now, so much more clearly than he could have hoped to. 

He rode on. At dusk, he came to the windmill. When he went inside, unsteady on his feet, his heart a hammer in his chest, he hoped he knew what to expect. Inside the windmill was where he found Janvier, sitting, waiting. 

"You're alive," Janvier said, as he pulled himself up. 

"Thanks to you, I believe." 

Janvier raised his brows. "No thanks to you, I believe," he replied. 

De Laurenac smiled a small, self-deprecating smile. He lingered in the doorway. 

"You could have told them that I lived," he said. 

"I could have killed you, too. Neither thing appealed." 

"Why did you do this?"

"Because I was with you in Laurenac. I understand. And you deserved a second option."

"And what now?"

"That's your choice, but I think I'll head for Spain." 

"Can I go with you?"

Janvier smiled faintly. "I hope you will," he said.

For a long moment, neither of them moved. For a long moment, neither of them said anything further. De Laurenac looked at him in the dying light of dusk there in that place he'd never been before and as free and as exultant as he'd felt before their duel, he felt it also then. He would miss his brothers, he thought, but he would not miss his father. He would not miss Laurenac. He would not miss his grandfather's fucking sword, or the name he'd never wanted. He would go into his mother's country, and find himself anew.

He went to him then, not because he had nowhere else to go, but because there was nowhere else he would rather be. 

And when they kissed, his arms pulling tight about Janvier's waist, it felt more like his life's solemn duty than anything else had ever been.


End file.
